"Student Voices" at North Seattle Community College
Jack Bautsch and Jim Harnish of North Seattle Community College (a member school of the "Student Voices" cluster) sent along examples of some of the work they are doing at NSCC to support student involvement in SoTL related activities and the life of the college.
We are working on ways to support "student voices" here. Since I'm co-chairing our accreditation self-study, my most immediate need is for students to serve on various accreditation committees. We're working on various ways to compensate them, including
* Work study position: either make serving on an accreditation committee PART of a larger work assignment or, for students with very small awards, make it their entire assignment.
* Internship or service learning credit: for students who need/want the credit, make such service a learning experience for which they can earn credit.
This has application in other areas, too, such as students serving on tenure review committees, or our college council, or other key committees.
We're exploring these ideas because we want to acknowledge that this is an extra commitment the student is making to our institution.
There's another venue in which we are trying to hear and honor "student voices," and that's through our Thursdays At One conversations about teaching and learning. We began them just this quarter, and are still "feeling our way along." It's an open-membership group (anyone can come) that makes up its agenda as it goes along. Right now we are reading Barr and Tagg's article on The Learning Paradigm (Change, 1995). We've got about 12 people-half of them students-coming on a regular basis.
--Jack Bautsch, Director of Research, Planning and Assessment